The 1926 Frankfurt Kitchen taught the modern fitted layout
A kitchen is where food is stored, prepared and cooked, whether a home room with stove, sink, refrigerator and modular cabinets or a heavy-duty commercial operation. Early medieval longhouses cooked over an open fire under the roof's peak, and smoke and fire risk later pushed many kitchens away from the great hall.
Wealthy medieval houses might keep multiple specialized kitchens, yet few survive because they were ephemeral. Colonial New England inventories, such as John Porter’s 1648 Windsor listing, already name kitchen goods behind parlor rooms. Rumford roasters and ranges later saved fuel and space.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen for social housing in 1926, a compact room of 1.9 by 3.4 metres built to save steps and construction costs. She based it on time-motion studies and tenant interviews, and about 10,000 Frankfurt apartments received it in the 1930s. Commercial kitchens in hospitals and barracks use heavier gear and face periodic public-health shutdowns if unclean.
The efficiency idea came from Christine Frederick, whose articles on New Household Management from 1913 applied Taylorist time-motion analysis to cooking. German and Austrian architects picked it up in the 1920s, among them Bruno Taut, Erna Meyer and Schütte-Lihotzky herself. Benita Otte had already fitted out the kitchen of the Haus am Horn, finished in 1923, the first of its kind.
Restaurants have changed too. Fast-food outlets may only finish or reheat meals delivered ready-made, while convenience stores have gained ground by cooking more on site. In India, poorer households still cook on clay stoves, the urban middle class uses bottled or piped gas, and biogas and solar power also fuel kitchens; the country has built the world's largest solar kitchen. Electric cooktops remain rare there because they draw so much power, but microwaves are spreading in cities.
Source: Kitchen
